from Hacker News

Why AI hasn't taken your job – And any jobs-pocalypse seems a long way off

by helsinkiandrew on 5/27/25, 6:41 AM with 51 comments

  • by Pinegulf on 5/27/25, 12:44 PM

  • by saithound on 5/27/25, 11:51 AM

    I don't even lean toward the worst-case AI narratives, but it sure feels like Economist journos will keep pushing our "here's why AI wont take your job" articles, even as their own writers get quietly pushed out by ChatGPT creeping across their open-plan office one desk at a time.

    In this piece, they lean heavily on precious "official American data", and celebrate the increased number of people working in translation, while conveniently ignoring more telling figures, such as the total amount those translators actually earn now per unit of work.

    My partner works in university administration, and their "official data" tells a much spicier story. Their university still ranks highest in our country for placing computer engineering grads within six months of graduation. But over just six terms, the number of graduates in employment within six months dropped by half. That's not a soft decline by any means, more like the system breaking in real time.

  • by FinnLobsien on 5/27/25, 12:51 PM

    From the current data, sure, things are fine. But societies and economies take decades to adapt to technologies.

    This article is like writing in the early 90s that "Newspaper circulation is actually stable"—true if you're looking at a still, not true if you're watching the movie.

    The "AI takes your job scenario" doesn't look like a company replacing your entire team with AI. It looks like the AI-enabled upstart with 100 people competing with your 2000 person company until it fails or replicates the AI-powered strategy.

    =

    Overall, I think this is a time of great upheaval (the combination of AI and post-ZIRP hangover) and we'll need to challenge a lot of the assumptions we had about careers and making money.

  • by helsinkiandrew on 5/27/25, 6:41 AM

  • by bgwalter on 5/27/25, 1:10 PM

    The press is the same on any issue. First, they deny any adverse predictions, then they backpedal, after three years they write the opposite and claim that they have always said so.

    There are also special issues like Russia sanctions on which the Economist changes its mind every three months.

  • by palmotea on 5/27/25, 3:02 PM

    Before AI takes your job, it will degrade your job:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders...:

    > But when technology transformed auto-making, meatpacking and even secretarial work, the response typically wasn’t to slash jobs and reduce the number of workers. It was to “degrade” the jobs, breaking them into simpler tasks to be performed over and over at a rapid clip. Small shops of skilled mechanics gave way to hundreds of workers spread across an assembly line. The personal secretary gave way to pools of typists and data-entry clerks.

    > The workers “complained of speed-up, work intensification, and work degradation,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff described it.

    > Something similar appears to be happening with artificial intelligence in one of the fields where it has been most widely adopted: coding.

  • by WillAdams on 5/27/25, 12:34 PM

    The big thing is, the UI for these tools is primitive at best, and there doesn't seem to be a facility for file-system or batch interaction, even on local models.

    Is it really so hard to:

    - test/develop a prompt which works on a single file

    - tell the interface to run the tested prompt on all the files in a specified folder

    - returning the collected output from all the prompts as a single output/file?

  • by dunkeltaenzer on 5/27/25, 12:08 PM

    Well, their framing isn't actually a lie. AI can replace people doing actual jobs. We have lots of work around the topic of Bullshit jobs, to have a clear picture, that a huge percentage of jobs isn't actually there, so someone to DO work, but for someone to HAVE work. AI has essentially no way to replace those jobs, because AIs don't feel proud or excited about the idea of uselessly helicopterdicking around for a business card with a pretty job title and a nice salary.

    The thing AI WILL do though, is making that situation more visible and clearly stating "yo guys. If you want me to optimize profits for this company, please leave your jobs and allow me to organize the few people remaining, who DO actual work and not just siphon money and power to feel better about their own uselessness

  • by andro_dev on 5/29/25, 3:58 AM

    It’s utter nonsense. None of my graphic design or illustrator friends, who are highly established professionals with great talent and impressive portfolios, can find jobs for an extended period. I know many of them personally. The current job market has been extremely challenging for them, and it’s not because of COVID-19. These artists were enjoying stable jobs in the past decade.

  • by kj4211cash on 5/27/25, 1:58 PM

    I would guess that we will be in this phase for awhile. HN seeing just how much AI can do and possibly seeing fewer jobs for developers. The Economist seeing flat productivity and employment numbers, adjusting for other factors. My educated guesses:

    1) There will always be productive ways to use human labor so we aren't on the precipice of mass unemployment.

    2) Individual lives are getting disrupted and will continue to get disrupted. It is sometimes difficult to tell what was actually caused by AI and what was caused by macroeconomic factors, the latest trend in Silicon Valley, etc. But there have already been many lives disrupted by the emergence of AI.

    3) A lot depends on how AI develops and, frankly, none of us know the answer to that.